Pierrot L. in New York

The oeuvre of Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), whose 150th birthday we are celebrating this year, is unique in the Western music history of the 20th century. His development began as a late romantic-expressionist composer who wrote works such as ‘Pelleas and Melisande’, went through a second free-atonal phase (e.g. the cycle ‘Pierrot lunaire’) and finally culminated in the development of the twelve-tone technique. With this technique, he shaped the second Viennese School, influenced generations of composers and laid the foundation for the development of new music in the 20th century. At the same time, we are celebrating the 125th birthday (and 50th anniversary of the death) of Duke Ellington (1899-1974), who grew up on the other side of the great ocean and who, not unlike Schönberg, helped shape and revolutionise the development of jazz in his 50-year career. From his beginnings as the creator of a hip new dance music in New York's Cotton Club in the 1920s, he developed into a serious African-American composer who thematised the fate and history of African-American people in full-length works (‘Black, Brown and Beige’) and processed Shakespeare and New Orleans in his suites. He expressed his faith in the religious ‘Sacred Concerts’. Hardly any jazz artist has left behind such a diverse and at the same time striking compositional oeuvre as Ellington.
And now imagine if the two had met. How would their work have changed after such an encounter?